The story of an epic drive – from Arctic North Cape to African South Cape – the first ever made by man and car. ” .”Pape made world history when, in 1955, in an ordinary British car he become the first man alive to drive from Latitude 71 degees North, 600 miles ABOVE the Arctic Circle, across two-thirds of the world’s surface, to the southern tip of Africa.rival foreign cars and drivers sought to steal his glory and the adventure developed into a race. Pape pressed on taking all risks in his stride, but narrowly missed death on three separate occasions. A much battered Pape and British Austin car finally arrived at Cape Town having beaten all rivals.

To nineteenth-century Europeans, they were the “noblest savages,” an elite corps of painted and feathered warriors, strangely aristocratic in their disdain of other people’s civilization.
For the Maasai, nothing has proved an inducement to change during the last 100 years: not peace for war; money for cattle; nor cities and settlement for the plains and open boundaries of their land covering much of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. This isolation, their land, their traditions, codes and values have all been defended in a long, mostly passive war of resistance carried out by a society structured as a standing army.

Now the old tribal conflicts are no longer acceptable in the new nation states. No land can be left fallow and unproductive and the Maasai cattle are counted in the national herds. Change has not been forced on the Maasai. But they are on the final retreat to the point of individual choice: either across the line of time and cultural advance or all the way back to the reservations – to whatever land is left to them.

In this superb, full-color portrait, photographers Mohamed Amin and Duncan Willetts have produced a comprehensive pictorial record, and John Eames the narrative background, to these remarkable people.